Almost All Major Oil Companies Have Known About Global Warming Since the 1970s

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/34261-almost-all-major-oil-companies-have-known-about-global-warming-since-the-1970s

New investigative reporting by Neela Banerjee with Inside Climate News revealed on Tuesday that scientists and engineers from nearly every major U.S. and multinational oil and gas company may have for decades known about the impacts of carbon emissions on the climate.

Between 1979 and 1983, the American Petroleum Institute (API), the industry’s most powerful lobby group, ran a task force for fossil fuel companies to “monitor and share climate research,” according to internal documents obtained by Inside Climate News.

According to the reporting:

Like Exxon, the companies also expressed a willingness to understand the links between their product, greater CO2 concentrations and the climate, the papers reveal. Some corporations ran their own research units as well, although they were smaller and less ambitious than Exxon’s and focused on climate modeling, said James J. Nelson, the former director of the task force.

“It was a fact-finding task force,” Nelson said in an interview. “We wanted to look at emerging science, the implications of it and where improvements could be made, if possible, to reduce emissions.”

The “CO2 and Climate Task Force,” which changed in 1980 its name to the “Climate and Energy Task Force,” included researchers from Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco and Sohio, among others.

One memo by an Exxon task force representative pointed to 1979 “background paper on CO2,” which “predicted when the first clear effects of climate change might be felt,” noting that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was rising steadily.

[PSPS]

1. Long before. The Bell System's "Bell Telephone Science Hour" addressed this in a 1958 broadcast.

This has been widely known in the scientific community for a very long time. Even Alexander Graham Bell himself wrote about the greenhouse effect from unchecked burning of fossil fuels, and advocated the use of alternate energy sources way back in 1917.

[KansDem]

2. "The Unchained Goddess" (1958)

[drm604]

3. I was not aware of this.

Very interesting.

[hatrack]

4. Even before that, Arrhenius published on the topic 120 years ago

He spent most of his career as a physical chemist, since climatology as a science didn't really exist back then, but he laid much of the ground work on how trace gases could change the entire planet's temperature.

From "Svante Arrhenius", by Steve Graham
January 18th, 2000, NASA Earth Observatory

EDIT

Arrhenius did very little research in the fields of climatology and geophysics, and considered any work in these fields a hobby. His basic approach was to apply knowledge of basic scientific principles to make sense of existing observations, while hypothesizing a theory on the cause of the “Ice Age.” Later on, his geophysical work would serve as a catalyst for the work of others.

In 1895, Arrhenius presented a paper to the Stockholm Physical Society titled, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.” This article described an energy budget model that considered the radiative effects of carbon dioxide (carbonic acid) and water vapor on the surface temperature of the Earth, and variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. In order to proceed with his experiments, Arrhenius relied heavily on the experiments and observations of other scientists, including Josef Stefan, Arvid Gustaf Högbom, Samuel Langley, Leon Teisserenc de Bort, Knut Angstrom, Alexander Buchan, Luigi De Marchi, Joseph Fourier, C.S.M. Pouillet, and John Tyndall.

Arrhenius argued that variations in trace constituents—namely carbon dioxide—of the atmosphere could greatly influence the heat budget of the Earth. Using the best data available to him (and making many assumptions and estimates that were necessary), he performed a series of calculations on the temperature effects of increasing and decreasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. His calculations showed that the “temperature of the Arctic regions would rise about 8 degrees or 9 degrees Celsius, if the carbonic acid increased 2.5 to 3 times its present value. In order to get the temperature of the ice age between the 40th and 50th parallels, the carbonic acid in the air should sink to 0.62 to 0.55 of present value (lowering the temperature 4 degrees to 5 degrees Celsius).”

EDIT

By 1904, Arrhenius became concerned with rapid increases in anthropogenic carbon emissions and recognized that “the slight percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere may, by the advances of industry, be changed to a noticeable degree in the course of a few centuries.” He eventually made the suggestion that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide due to the burning of fossil fuels could be beneficial, making the Earth's climates “more equable,” stimulating plant growth, and providing more food for a larger population. This view differs radically from current concerns over the harmful effects of a global warming caused by industrial emissions and deforestation. Until about 1960, most scientists dismissed the notion as implausible that humans could significantly affect average global temperatures. Today, however, we know that carbon dioxide levels have risen about 25 percent—a rate much faster than Arrhenius first predicted—and average global temperatures have risen about 0.5 degrees Celsius.

EDIT/END

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Arrhenius/

[Mnemosyne]

5. No words. nt

[Bigmack]

6. My ex - an atmospheric physicist - has accepted the science of climate change

since the 1970's. Inexplicably he's also a Republican! 'Splain me that! Ms Bigmack